Didn't dilute after the boil.

[jayplac]

I'm new to home brewing. The recipe that I tried on Saturday in a nutshell is this:

12 lbs of grain in a one hour mash @ around 147-149, followed by a 90 minute boil with 2 oz of hops added. I cooled the wort (3.5 gal.) and put into carboy then added yeast. Original gravity was 1.056.

What I didn't do was dilute the wort because it wasn't in the recipe (which was written down from memory.) The beer went nuts on Sunday and Monday and has been pretty quiet almost has quickly as it roared to life.

I'm looking for advice here. One guy I talked to said that it will have a bolder flavor and not to worry about it. I'm scared that the yeast aren't able to consume all of the sugars because the mix is too dense. Has anyone hit this problem before? Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,
Jason

 

[d3track]

Relax
Don't
Worry

You'll be just fine, when doing all grain there very rarely is a "top off" step.

 

[Yooper]

I'm new to home brewing. The recipe that I tried on Saturday in a nutshell is this:

12 lbs of grain in a one hour mash @ around 147-149, followed by a 90 minute boil with 2 oz of hops added. I cooled the wort (3.5 gal.) and put into carboy then added yeast. Original gravity was 1.056.

What I didn't do was dilute the wort because it wasn't in the recipe (which was written down from memory.) The beer went nuts on Sunday and Monday and has been pretty quiet almost has quickly as it roared to life.

I'm looking for advice here. One guy I talked to said that it will have a bolder flavor and not to worry about it. I'm scared that the yeast aren't able to consume all of the sugars because the mix is too dense. Has anyone hit this problem before? Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,
Jason

1.056 is a medium original gravity, and it sounds fine. Normally, you don't add water to top off an all-grain beer.

If you post the recipe, and tell us what you are going for, we could take a look and give specific advice.

 

[FatDragon]

3.5 gallons of 1.056 OG wort from 12 pounds of grain is very low mash efficency. It's certainly possible that you actually wound up with such an inefficient mash, but I'm tempted to suspect that you got a bad reading with your hydrometer - perhaps you read too hot and didn't accurately correct for the temperature (as you go hotter, temperature corrections get less and less accurate), perhaps your wort wasn't adequately mixed (typically an extract issue, but it can happen with all-grain brewing as well), perhaps your hydrometer isn't properly calibrated (my first hydrometer read everything six gravity points low, as tested several times against distilled water at the hydrometer's calibration temperature).

Either way, as the other respondents have said, topping off with water after the boil isn't typically a technique used by all-grain brewers. That said, if your brewday ends up with less than your intended wort volume and higher than your intended OG, there's no reason you can't top off. Just be sure to use water that won't introduce an infection - i.e. fresh from the tap = potentially bad, boiled tap water or distilled water = okay.

As Yooper said, seeing your recipe would be helpful. Knowing what you (or the recipe creator if you got a kit or brewed someone else's recipe) were aiming for is the only way we can give you proper advice.

 

[BlueHouseBrewhaus]

As for the load for your yeast, there's no worry. Yeast eat sugar. Doesn't matter if it's concentrated or diluted. If you had topped off, there would have been the same amount of sugar - just more diluted. They'll eat it either way.

 

[rupert130]

What yeast are you using. English strains can get the majority of their work done very quickly, especially if your fermentation temperature was high

 

[jayplac]

Well, as it would have it, I calibrated my hydrometer in 60ish degree distilled water and low and behold it was...... 0.994. That was a good tip Dragon and that makes me pretty happy. Assuming I use the same hydrometer though, it should make a difference in my total ABV.

I can't decipher the receipt right now to tell you what's in the brew. I'm going to do that this weekend when I visit the retailer and I'll post back. Thanks everyone for their advice. It's going to hear from you.